Rock of Ages, Junior Bender #8, by Timothy Hallinan ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆
I have been a fan of Timothy Hallinan’s Junior Bender mysteries from the beginning, starting the ride with #1 in the series, Crashed. The sharp wit, crackling dialog, and quirky cast of unique characters drew me in from the first page of that first book, and I have eagerly awaited each new installment since.
When the eighth Junior Bender’s novel hit my doorstep I dropped the book I was currently reading like a hot rock and dove back into Timothy Hallinan’s L.A.—and was hit with a couple of surprises right off the bat.
The second surprise was that the story again involves rock music, similar to the main story in Little Elvises, only this time it revolves around a nationwide reunion tour of fading rock-and-roll bands that was being run by a quartet of similarly fading mid-level thugs reliving the music-entrepreneur days of their youth. Where Junior comes into this escapade once again involves Irwin Dressler, a very high-level mobster, of very advanced years, who, coincidentally, we first meet in Little Elvises.
As it happens, Dressler had invested a significant sum of money as backing for the rock-and-roll tour and had come to suspect, as the tour came down to its final performances, in L.A., that the four bent-nose types who were running the show were planning to abscond with the profits, including Dressler’s cut, thumbing said noses as they disappeared into the sunset.
And that’s where Junior comes in. Dressler hires him to check out the situation at the final performances of the tour, a three-night run in a down-market venue in midtown L.A.; find out if the four tour promoters are indeed skimming the profits; and if so, where they were keeping the cash and when they are making their run for it. It’s not so much about the cash, for Dressler, as it is about the—for lack of a better word—principle of the thing. Though in his 90s and in less-than-perfect health, he is not prepared to let these four schmucks disrespect him, lining their pockets while simultaneously earning the bragging rights attendant upon having put one over on Irwin Dressler and living to tell the tale.
Rock of Ages differs from previous Junior Bender books in being tied down to essentially two locations: the theater where the concerts are taking place, and to a lesser extent, Irwin Dressler’s mansion. It feels limiting, and forces the reader to build a fairly complete and detailed mental picture of the theater itself and its accompanying two-story office building in order to make sense of the action. Fans of the series will be happy to find, however, that the snappy, quick-witted dialogue and first-person narration by Junior Bender remain as good as ever. I was particularly pleased to see that one of my favorite supporting-cast characters from previous books in the series, the charmingly lethal gunsel Debbie Halstead, plays an important role in the action.
Taken as a whole, however, the story in Rock of Ages doesn’t hang together as well as some of the earlier Junior Bender books. It notably lacks a well-defined secondary plot, an enhancing feature of some of the previous books; for example, Little Elvises, in which Junior, in an aside from the main story, looks into the disappearance of the adult daughter of his current landlady. There are a couple of minor characters that seem almost extraneous, some story threads introduced that just sort of peter out, and the ending—which I admittedly had to read twice to fully suss it out—was unsettlingly abrupt. I waffled between 3-1/2 and 4 stars for this review, settling on four because, overall, it was just so good to see Junior back on the page in something new.
But I am still expecting to see Junior taking his talents to New Jersey in a future appearance, in search of a way to reunite his current love, Ronnie, with her son.
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